Short Attention Span vs. Clock of the Long Now

↑ The Clock of the Long Now is a portrait of Danny Hillis, founder of the Long Now Foundation, and his brilliant team of inventors, futurists, and engineers as they build the 10,000-year clock. The film, like the clock itself, celebrates the power of long-term thinking and mankind’s thirst to solve life’s biggest problems.

“Civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span. The trend might be coming from the acceleration of technology, the short-horizon perspective of market-driven economics, the next-election perspective of democracies, or the distractions of personal multi-tasking. All are on the increase. Some sort of balancing corrective to the short-sightedness is needed—some mechanism or myth which encourages the long view and the taking of long-term responsibility, where ‘long-term’ is measured at least in centuries. Long Now proposes both a mechanism and a myth.” —Stewart Brand